


The New Normal

by Telaryn



Category: Leverage
Genre: Breakfast, Children, Domestic Fluff, Eliot Spencer's Cooking, Fluff, Kid Fic, Multi, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-12 02:02:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9050830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Telaryn/pseuds/Telaryn
Summary: Eliot's life has really changed since making things official with Parker and Hardison.  For one thing, you never know who's coming to breakfast.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kawuli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kawuli/gifts).



> From the prompt: Parker/Eliot/Hardison pick up strays (human or animal). Thank you for playing with us Kawuli - hope to see you next year!

It wasn’t as though Eliot _never_ drank coffee. With certain meals under certain conditions it was the perfect finishing note. And Toby had taught him the value of coffee beans as a way to clear the nostrils – which was why he always kept a dish of Arabica beans handy when he was preparing a particularly complicated meal. He’d just lost the need to use it as a morning crutch years ago, somewhere between leaving the military and going to work for Damien Moreau.

Of course there were mornings – like this one where he’d ended up with considerably less than his required minimum ninety minutes of sleep – stumbling into the kitchen and finding a small, tow-headed child sitting at the table digging enthusiastically into Parker’s cereal.

Yeah, mornings like this he could definitely see why people mainlined the stuff like crack. “How did you get in here?” he asked the…girl, he decided, taking a closer look at the bone structure and the smooth line of the throat. “Do I know you?”

He’d grown up part of a large family – four younger brothers and sisters in addition to his own twin brother – so Eliot understood the look he got from the scruffy intruder instantly. It was textbook small child for “you don’t really expect me to answer that with my mouth full, do you? Because I will.” “Never mind,” he said finally, heading for the refrigerator and retrieving the orange juice. Pouring a small glass, he returned to the table and set it in front of the girl. “You drink that whole thing before you talk to me about another bowl,” he said, taking the open box and pulling it back out of her reach.

The girl’s eyes tracked everything, but she didn’t seem inclined to speak. Once she finished her bowl of cereal though, she reached automatically for the box. Narrowing his eyes, Eliot pulled it even further out of her reach. Her dark eyes glared back at him for a long moment, before she thumped back into her chair and dutifully picked up the glass of orange juice.

Hardison’s footsteps were suddenly audible in the hall outside. “Cats are fed,” the hacker announced with a yawn as he came into the kitchen. “That mutt of yours has been walked and fed too, and holy hell, we have a kid?” If the traditional needle screech could be replicated in human speech, Eliot was reasonably certain Hardison had just pulled it off to perfection.

“We have a kid?” Hardison repeated, confusion writ large on his face as he looked to Eliot for answers the hitter did not have. “Why do we have a kid?”

“You ever notice how we don’t do ‘why’ anymore?” Eliot responded with a sigh of resignation. “It never ends well. You hungry?”

Underneath his confusion, the hacker looked just as tired as Eliot felt. Nodding gratefully, he leaned down and kissed Eliot on the cheek, mumbling his thanks as he half-fell, half-sat in a nearby chair. “She can have another bowl when she finishes the juice,” Eliot said, pushing himself to his feet with a groan. “Pancakes or eggs?”

He didn’t know why he bothered asking. In their own ways, Parker and Hardison’s individual tastes were as juvenile as their guest’s. Pulling out everything he needed to make pancakes for all of them, Eliot wondered if he dared try sneaking some protein powder into the mix.

“It’s got to be a Parker thing, right?” Hardison asked while he was measuring out flour. “The kid?”

Eliot snorted. “You’re asking me? You were both up before I was.” And if that wasn’t a mark of how much his world had changed since making things formal with hacker and thief, Eliot didn’t know what was. Catching up two eggs, he expertly cracked them together without even the smallest fragment of shell falling into the mix. “Did she say anything to you?”

“Nah,” Hardison managed – even though the word was half-swallowed by a yawn. “She was long gone by the time I woke up. I figured after riding…” Eyes wide, Eliot whipped around to warn the other man, but Hardison had already checked himself. “…both horsies so hard last night she would have been as tired as we were.”

The girl’s expression never changed as Hardison spoke, and Eliot let out a quiet breath. Her dark eyes went back and forth between the two of them as if she was watching some sort of demented tennis match, but otherwise she seemed perfectly content to inhale her second – or was it her third? – bowl of cereal. Finally convincing himself that nothing was going to explode – literally or figuratively – Eliot went back to his cooking.

 _Horsies? Really man?_ Now he wasn’t going to be able to watch Hardison and Parker having sex without smirking, and wouldn’t Parker just have a field day with that?

A sort of uneasy quiet fell across the kitchen as Eliot reeled off three pancakes for Hardison, one for their guest, and three for himself. When he could trust himself, Hardison poured out juice for himself and Eliot and got himself a cup of coffee – Eliot having won the fight about orange soda at the breakfast table months ago.

He was getting ready to ask Hardison if he wanted more pancakes when Parker bounced into the kitchen – Eliot’s kitten “Mr. Punchy” riding her shoulder. “Morning!” the thief sang out, not so much joining them at the table as engaging in a controlled tumble that against all odds landed her in a chair. Eliot clapped his hands sharply to get Mr. Punchy’s attention and glared at the kitten, who was getting ready to leap to the table.

“You should be nicer to Mr. Punchy,” Parker said, as the kitten finally let itself be stared down by Eliot and leaped to the floor. “You know he thinks he’s human like us. Are those pancakes?” Her expression brightened automatically, distracting Eliot from being drawn into a debate on whether or not the feisty little tuxedo cat could change species by sheer force of will.

He started to get out of the chair automatically. “Five?” he asked, and Parker nodded.

Before he could retreat to the stove, Hardison’s patience finally gave out. “Uh, Parker?” When the thief’s attention finally turned to him, he stared pointedly across the table at the little girl. Parker followed his gaze, but didn’t seem to understand at first what he wanted.

“Who is she, Parker?” Eliot asked finally, crossing his arms over his chest.

The thief blinked, then seemed to remember something. “Oh yeah – you guys were still asleep when I went out, weren’t you? This is Malia.” Holding up her hand in the child’s direction, Parker was rewarded with a perfectly placed “high five” from the little girl. “She tried to steal my wallet when I was going to the store. Her technique’s not bad, but she telegraphs. Nothing a little practice won’t take care of though. Any-way,” she continued, drawing out the word on purpose to shut down any argument either Eliot or Hardison was getting ready to make, “I asked her if she was hungry. My technique was never very good when I was hungry. And when she said yes, I brought her in here…are you counting?”

Point of fact, Eliot had already counted to ten in English and Spanish, and was half-way through doing it in Serbian when she asked, so the only answer he could give was a quick nod. It had taken him a long time to get to the point of not exploding every time Parker and Hardison turned his world upside down, but the work had largely yielded positive results, so he kept at it.

Hardison, however, rarely employed such methods in his own interactions with Parker. “Are we keeping her?”

Eliot reached ten and as such was perfectly calm when he glared at the hacker. “We are _not_ keeping her. This is a child, not a stray dog or cat.” _Or ferret,_ he thought, but the less said about Sterling-the-ferret and his mercifully short stay in Portland, the better.

“Don’t listen to him,” Parker said, leaning in towards Malia conspiratorially. “He’s always grumpy at first, but he comes around.”

It had been a while since Eliot was driven to count to ten in Mandarin – it usually only happened when he was about to spectacularly lose an argument to one or the other of his partners. _Or in this case, possibly both,_ he was forced to acknowledge.

He wondered if the local Amazon distribution center had same day delivery on children’s clothing.


End file.
